


Her Name Tastes of Dead Ash

by saltandlimes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Clone Wars, F/M, Missing Scene, post "crisis at the heart"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 01:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10205744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltandlimes/pseuds/saltandlimes
Summary: Sent on a mission to the isolated world of Lokori to retrieve a prototype communications array, Anakin contemplates his marriage and a war that seems to never end.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so happy to come back to writing Anakin in this fic! He's a wonderful character, and I always enjoy his voice. 
> 
> You can probably read this without having watched TCW, to be honest.

Anakin wipes sweat from his face, panting in the late evening heat. Lokori is warm this time of year, the capital city overgrown with creeping vines and great flowering bushes. There are streaks of pollen across his face, and his throat feels thick with it, closing up, every breath a little labored. It’s a different heat than that of Tatooine, this one pulsing with life, with the Force. No blowing sand, no scorching sun. Only the thick press of wet air and the slow drip of water as it slides down the pavement to drains that feed greenhouses around the city. 

He steps back inside the Republic’s small guard post, the rush of conditioned air sharp against his skin. The corridor is empty as he walks deeper inside, his feet echoing off the polished floor. When he pushes open the door to the tiny CIC, it’s heavy, pressure difference holding it closed. 

“Any news?” Anakin asks, as the door falls shut behind him. Rex looks up from the small holotank, blue glow making his cheekbones stand in sharp relief. 

“Helical promises they’ll have the prototype array ready for transport tomorrow. They couldn’t tell me when tomorrow, but they’re certain it’ll be before nightfall.” Rex snorts, “It seems they time everything by the sun here. Of course, since it’s light out almost 17 standard hours, I guess that’s a long enough day for anything to happen.” 

Anakin pounds his fist into his leg, then takes a deep breath. It leaves his chest slowly. His ribs close, his mind unfolds like a flower, and he lets himself drift in the Force for a moment. He sucks his bottom lip inside his mouth, biting it for a single second. 

“Guess we’re here for the night,” he tells Rex, voice level. He runs his tongue across the inside of his lip, a slow caress. Rex shakes his head slowly. 

“Seems odd they sent us out here like this. Helical’s research really that important?”

Anakin shrugs. It is odd, and he knows, deep down, that it’s not right. There have only been weeks since the disaster on Scipio and there’s so much damage still to repair, so much that Clovis’s machinations damaged. But the council doesn’t trust him to set that right. 

Oh no. Force forbid they think he could actually fix something, help someone. 

No, all they seem to think he’s good for is being a blunt weapon. A strong arm to wield when things go sideways, when things are simply too messy for the likes of Mace Windu. No reason to trust him with anything but transporting experimental communications devices to the front lines, his only purpose staying there to fight and watch his troops die in agony. 

“You in there?” Rex asks him, quirking an eyebrow. Anakin shakes himself, trying to relax his shoulders. 

“Sorry, Rex. Just thinking. It is odd they sent us out here, but I guess they’re worried about this shipment. Lokori has been facing increasing raids in recent weeks.” Rex nods, but his lips are tight. 

“Guess I’ll go tell the troops we’re bedding down here tonight. Should be enough room if we set up some tents. Good thing most of us stayed on board.” Rex’s eyes dart upward, to where Yularen’s ship hangs somewhere far above them, making its slow way around the planet in unceasing orbits. 

“Tell them to take an extra hour of rest in the morning. Who knows when we’ll get it again,” Anakin tells him. Rex nods, and then Anakin is alone in the tiny room. He shakes himself, trying to somehow throw off Scipio’s spectre, the spectre of money and blood and shame. 

The door bangs shut behind him, and Anakin sets off through the tiny base, his feet working against the floor of their own accord. They lead him down a narrow hall, doors opening on right and left into sleeping quarters. At the end of the hall is a spiral staircase. It’s heavy metal, blackened and solid. When Anakin steps onto the first stair, he can feel the vibrations that shudder through it. 

He climbs. 

At first he thinks the stair must simply be an alternative to the one near the entrance, a quirk of local architecture that simply leads to the second floor. But then, once his legs carry him far enough up that he rounds a corner and sees that level stretching away from him, he realizes the stair does not end. Instead it continues up into murky darkness. The lights on this floor are not switched on to chase away the short summer night. 

It’s the knock of wood against his head that tells Anakin he’s reached the top. He rubs absently at his scalp with one hand. The other slides across the thick grain of the wood, fingers tracing boards. Eventually he comes to what seems like a seam in the ceiling. A quick swipe of his hand, and Anakin finds the outline of a trapdoor, a latch on one side. He presses his hand to it and it clicks open. 

When Anakin pushes against the door, it lifts up. He shoves harder and it groans on its hinges. Then it flies open with a soft bang, and the evening air rushes in to meet his face. Anakin takes a deep breath, the smell of nightlac blooms thick on the air. The last few stairs creak under his feet, and then he’s standing on the roof of the outpost. 

He kicks the trapdoor shut behind himself, not wanting the cool air of the base to escape into this heavy night. Then he makes his way to the thin railing that rings the roof. 

The space was clearly meant as a terrace of some sort. There’s a bench huddled in one corner, wrought of some material Anakin does not know in the form of creepers and trailing vines, climbing, growing things. Across from it is a small pedestal, and when Anakin leaves the railing to run his fingers over its edge, he finds some sort of astronomical device. There are moons inscribed around it, the twin moons that are visible clearly at the same time in Lokori’s sky. Then, farther out, the single tiny moon that never joins them in the sky, making its own solitary way around the planet, a single speck of light that gleams in the darkest heart of the early morning hours. 

The weather has cooled a little, since Anakin stepped inside earlier, and now it is simply hot, not the oppressive, weighty burn of the day. Anakin makes his way to the bench. It’s sun-warmed underneath him, but there is no moisture collected on it. If he lets himself, he finds that he can lie down, head resting against a sculpted leaf, back cradled by the bench’s embrace. 

He spends long moments there with his eyes shut, simply breathing. He tries for a moment to meditate, but the Force flows about him in swirling eddies. Anakin reaches into it, but his mind glides away, and he cannot release his energy to the flow of the life of the planet. 

His eyes flutter open. 

The stars are thick above him. Through half shut lids they flicker, narrow candles lighting the dark highways of space. 

_Has anyone been to ‘em all?_

His own voice echoes in his ears, different constellations trying to find there way on top of those that shine above Lokori. Tatooine’s suns seem to lurk just off the horizon when Anakin glances towards it, and he tears his eyes away as fast as he can. 

_Not likely…_

Qui Gon’s laugh sounds different after long years of memory, after war and so many other voices laughing in his ears. Anakin stretches a hand above himself. He blocks out first one star and then another, wondering what worlds he has blotted from existence in the process. Maybe this one is Umbara, or this one Tatooine, or that one Scipio. 

Every one of those worlds, a hell of its own making. Slaughter on Umbara, and Anakin’s first realization that even the Jedi Order harbors traitors. He hadn’t really wanted to believe, before then, that the shadows at the corners of his eyes were real and evil, and that they formed the living figures who now walk the ancient halls and pollute the Jedi way. He’d learned then, learned too well, in a mess of fire and death. 

And Scipio, with its rotting banks and musty traitors. A seething mass of corruption, and it sets his teeth on edge just to think of it. Somewhere out there, above him, is the world which almost tore Padme from him, ensnared her in its webs of hatred and deception. Now he and she balance on the edge of a knife. 

He clenches his fist where it’s still raised in front of his face. It was a foolish dream, to want to visit every star. For every wonder out there, there is another person enslaved, another world being ground to dirt under the heel of the Separatists, or the cartels, or the syndicates, or the Hutts. The Republic’s peace stretches over far less of the galaxy than he dreamed it did when he was a child. 

He uncurls one finger, tracing the curves of the sky. Somewhere out there is Naboo, and somewhere even deeper towards the core is Coruscant. Somewhere out there is Padme. Anakin wonders what she’s doing. Bent over her desk, hair loose down her back, pouring over some new report from the Senate, maybe. Or, eyes blazing with secret fire, speaking to her friends. Perhaps even staring out from the balcony of her apartments, looking at these very same stars. 

Anakin lets his hand fall back to his chest. He wonders if Padme is thinking of him. If, across millions of kilometers, the endless dead space of the sky, her mind reaches for his. His heartbeat sounds in his ears, slow and steady. 

She probably isn’t looking up. 

Anakin presses his lips more tightly together, mouth aching with the force of it. He stares harder at the stars above him, perfect order in the dark of night. His throat tightens again, but this time he can’t blame it on flowers or heat. This time, the thickness behind his eyes is all of his own making. 

“Padme,” he whispers, and her name tastes like the dead ash of the battlefield on his lips. Anakin stares harder at the sky, trying to feel the invisible strands of passion that connect his heart to the one beating in Padme’s chest. 

“Padme, I’m sorry.”

This time his voice is stronger, the words tumbling out to tremble in the air before him. Anakin tries to push them forward, push them out to the stars with the force of his heart and his mind and his will. 

“I know you love me. I’ve always known. You’ve cared about me for so long, and I should never have doubted that Clovis could come between us. I should never have tried to tell you who you can and cannot see. I…” Anakin pauses, eyes prickling, chest thick with unanswered longing. “I can’t lose you too.”

He wraps his arms around his waist, holding himself more tightly than before. His skin crawls, chill spreading from the base of his spine, ice fingers wrapping around his hips to press into the arch of his hips. 

“You’re the only one who knows,” he whispers, breath catching in the prison of bones and flesh beneath his arms. “I didn’t even tell Obi-Wan.”

Tatooine was never like this, wet air cooling at night to leave a chill on the skin. No, Tatooine was hatred and dust and death, his mother’s screams at the dead of night. 

“I can’t lose you, Padme. You’re the only one who understands anything. The only thing that matters, you and the Republic. You and freedom. I have to fight for you, no matter the costs. If I don’t…” Anakin takes a deep, shuddering breath, suddenly aware that the wetness on his cheeks is not the sweating condensation of the humid air. 

“If I don’t, it all means nothing.”

“If I don’t, I mean nothing.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang with me on tumblr at [saltandlimes](http://saltandlimes.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Broken in the Same Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10643868) by [PoliticalPadmé (magnetgirl)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnetgirl/pseuds/PoliticalPadm%C3%A9)
  * [And the Stars Whisper Their Laments](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10898388) by [OrderOfRevan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrderOfRevan/pseuds/OrderOfRevan)




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